Dick Cheney on Benghazi: We would have been ‘locked and loaded’

Ex-Vice President Dick Cheney, the man who predicted we would be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq, is keeping a furious pace of criticism over the Obama administration’s response to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Cheney is delivering his salvos on Fox News, which pumped the story during closing months of the 2012 campaign and serves as the unofficial broadcast wing of the Republican Party.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney: “We were always there, locked and loaded, ready to go on 9/11.”

“In my past experience, when we got into these situations — especially after 9/11 — we were always there, locked and loaded, ready to go on 9/11,” Cheney said. “We have specially trained units that practice this thing all the time. They are very good at it and they are chomping at the bit to go.

“It makes no sense.”

During the Bush-Cheney administration, however, there were repeated attacks on U.S. diplomatic installations. In December 2004, for instance, four guards and five staff were killed in an attack on the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. None of the dead were Americans.

Cheney is not to be deterred, even with the 9/11 Commission’s report of warnings of an attack in the United States that went unheeded in his administration.

“They lied,” he said of Obama administration officials. “They ignored repeated warnings from the CIA about the threat. They ignored messages from their own people that they needed more security on the ground. I think it’s one of the worst instances, frankly, that I can recall in my career.”

Ex-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who served in both the Bush and Obama administrations, refused to grandstand in a Sunday appearance on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

“Frankly, had I been in the job at the time, I think my decisions would have been just as theirs (the U.S. military) were,” said Gates. He would not have “approved sending an aircraft, a single aircraft, over Benghazi under those circumstances,” Gates added.

Gates, a former CIA director as well as boss of the Pentagon, spends much of his time in Washington state at a home in the Skagit Valley.

“It’s sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces,” he added. “The one thing that our forces are noted for is planning and preparation before we send people in harm’s way, and there just wasn’t time for that.”